The Alamo: An Epic

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The Alamo is an American epic about one of the great mythic moments in U.S. history. The subject is the Texas Revolution, the critical event in the complex and gradual takeover of Northern Mexico by Anglo-Americans, which culminated in the Mexican War and fixed the territories of the two major nation-states of North America. Part Odyssey, part Iliad, part American western, The Alamo follows the linked but episodic adventures of its hero, William Barret Travis, and the legendary figures Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie through the siege and battle of the Alamo, as they lead a vastly outmanned Texas army of independence against the charismatic and ruthless Mexican General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Like the major epics of the past, The Alamo is the product of an act of synthesis, in which elements from classical and Renaissance epic are blended with the realism of the historical novel, the pace of cinema, and the vividness of imagery characteristic of the best Romantic and Modernist lyric poetry. Into the familiar story of the Battle of the Alamo and the Texas Revolution, Michael Lind has introduced an unprecedented degree of historical accuracy, psychological realism, and social observation. Dozens of characters - ranging from the famous and great like Santa Anna and Sam Houston to the unfamiliar, like the wives and mothers of the small town of Gonzales, Texas, and the forgotten soldiers of the Mexican army - come to life in this epic retelling of an American legend.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly - Cahners\\Publishers_Weekly

Versatile, prolific and ambitious, Lind is a staff writer at the New Yorker, author of heavyweight works of political journalism (Up from Conservatism; The Next American Nation) and a novelist (Powertown). Before any of that, however, back in 1984, he began a poem about the Alamo. Twelve years later, Lind presents this masterly 6000-line narrative epic. It takes the form of 12 "books," each of which is composed of roughly 70 metered and rhymed seven-line stanzas and introduced by a one-page argument presented in rhymed couplets. Lind is remarkably faithful to the form he has set for himself, but that rigor, which can become tedious, is tempered by welcome gusts of vernacular language. To the Homeric battlefield Lind sometimes brings a visual sense that makes a reader think of Sam Peckinpah: "The fog unravels. But this is no fog,/ this blear amalgam of a scumbled dust/ and stinging fumes. An isolated leg,/ wrapped like a maize ear in a tattered husk/ of trouser cotton, glows in noonday dusk./ A headless soldier bows; the freckling paint/ has made his gulping pal a stigmaed saint." The narrative begins, classically, in medias res, and proceeds via flashbacks and forward leaps to tell the story of the Alamo and to paint the world in which the battle occurred. There are allusions to history and the stars; by names ("the Tennessean," "white-skinned Cherokee"), natural history (the origin of mustangs, "dogged spirits of the plains") and lengthy orations. Davey Crockett, Jim Bowie, Sam Houston, General Santa Anna and William Travis, the hero, appear in heroic postures but also in their human frailty, as do dozens of lesser players, both Mexican and Texan. Two appendixes, an essay on epic and one on heroic verse, offer Lind's apologia. They're interesting but unnecessary. The work speaks for itself. As a poem, as a narrative and as an effort at adapting a classical art form to the task of illuminating history, The Alamo is unforgettable. (Mar.) RISBN 0819522430 >This energetic collection is very different from Hillman's recent collections, Death Tractates (1992) and its companion volume Bright Existence. That pair took a somber, reflective tone in dealing with a close friend's death and Hillman's attempts to come to terms with mortality. This volume is as loose as the sequence of 12 poems from which comes the book's title-a wild ride that includes quotes, parenthetical fragments, monetary charts and wonderful poetic snapshots of Hillman's native Brazil (where her father worked in the sugar industry) as well as descriptions of her current life ("sometimes the outline of my husband's ear in the half dark/ looks like Brazil"). The poems are concerned with the connection between immediacy and history, body and soul, thought and feeling. But sustained poetic argument is not Hillman's focus here. Conceit and idea fade before sensuous descriptions of men and women whose "hands were sleek/ with asking sleek with asking," of schoolboys with "those long intramural after/ the library type fingers/ they would later put in you," and of girls standing "in long paisley dresses, coyote cries/ coming through them, something frightened and/ being canceled." In many ways, the collection lives up to its title: its attention is scattered, and so are its many pleasures.

Publishers Weekly

Versatile, prolific and ambitious, Lind is a staff writer at the New Yorker, author of heavyweight works of political journalism (Up from Conservatism; The Next American Nation) and a novelist (Powertown). Before any of that, however, back in 1984, he began a poem about the Alamo. Twelve years later, Lind presents this masterly 6000-line narrative epic. It takes the form of 12 "books," each of which is composed of roughly 70 metered and rhymed seven-line stanzas and introduced by a one-page argument presented in rhymed couplets. Lind is remarkably faithful to the form he has set for himself, but that rigor, which can become tedious, is tempered by welcome gusts of vernacular language. To the Homeric battlefield Lind sometimes brings a visual sense that makes a reader think of Sam Peckinpah: "The fog unravels. But this is no fog,/ this blear amalgam of a scumbled dust/ and stinging fumes. An isolated leg,/ wrapped like a maize ear in a tattered husk/ of trouser cotton, glows in noonday dusk./ A headless soldier bows; the freckling paint/ has made his gulping pal a stigmaed saint." The narrative begins, classically, in medias res, and proceeds via flashbacks and forward leaps to tell the story of the Alamo and to paint the world in which the battle occurred. There are allusions to history and the stars; by names ("the Tennessean," "white-skinned Cherokee"), natural history (the origin of mustangs, "dogged spirits of the plains") and lengthy orations. Davey Crockett, Jim Bowie, Sam Houston, General Santa Anna and William Travis, the hero, appear in heroic postures but also in their human frailty, as do dozens of lesser players, both Mexican and Texan. Two appendixes, an essay on epic and one on heroic verse, offer Lind's apologia. They're interesting but unnecessary. The work speaks for itself. As a poem, as a narrative and as an effort at adapting a classical art form to the task of illuminating history, The Alamo is unforgettable. (Mar.)

Library Journal

Who wouldn't admire, in principle at least, a 281-page narrative poem that rhymesnot in mere quatrains but in the rhyme royale championed by Chaucer and Shakespeare? This first and amazingly ambitious book of poetry by neo-liberal neo-conservative Lind was written, according to the author, over a period of 12 years. It details the events of the Texas Revolution, ending in the bloody defeat of the Alamo in 1836. The poet makes liberal use of the Homeric simile: "The presidarios has disappeared/ into the motte's dim maze, the way a corps/ of snuffling javelinas blend with weird/ penumbras in the forest near the shore." Unfortunately, the effect can be more Disneyesque than classical, with embellished detail standing in for affect: "her baby palisaded against harms/ and horror by a pair of freckled arms." Lind's iambic pentameter gets bogged down by syllable-spacing adjectives, and the rhymevirtuously perfect, rather than slant or offhas a plotted feel to it. But as the action picks up in Book 5, so does the writing. An essay on the epic form follows a glossary and historical timetable. For larger collections.Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York

School Library Journal